Prison Time

The most biting chapter in Brown’s brilliant and bitter book was titled “The Abandonment.” Here Brown went into pointed detail on how a host of Black bourgeois elites (Brown’s hall of shame included William Julius Wilson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Vernon Jordan, Alexis Herman, Armstrong Williams, Ellis Cose, Thomas Sowell, Chris Rock, Russell Simmons, Cynthia Tucker, Jesse Jackson, most members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and of course Oprah Winfrey) aligned themselves with the bipartisan, and pseudo-color-blind neoliberal racism of the Clintons.  These Black misleaders joined the Clintons and other white elites in blaming the Black poor for their own oppression, in backing the vicious removal of millions of poor Black women and children from the welfare rolls, and in supporting a savage “three strikes” crime bill that drastically expanded the nation’s racist mass arrest and incarceration system.  These and other Black “leaders” functioned as what Brown called “new model House Slaves” and Black “Slave Overseers.” “It was this New Age racist-era abandonment of principle, this shrugging of shoulders and turning of backs by Blacks and former friends,” Brown wrote, “that had set the stage for the unchallenged prosecution of a thirteen-year-old Black boy.”--PS

Mr. Street.  Read it and weep.


TS